IV. The Third Son, Alyosha

He was only twenty at the time (his brother Ivan was then in his twenty-fourth year, and their eldest brother, Dmitri, in his twenty-eighth). First of all I declare that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic at all, and, in my opinion at least, not even a mystic. I will give my full opinion in advance: he was simply an early lover of humanity, and if he threw himself onto the monastery road, it was only because at that time it alone struck him and offered him, so to speak, the ideal way out for his soul, which was struggling from the darkness of worldly malice toward the light of love. And this road struck him only because on it he met at that time what was in his opinion an extraordinary being, our famous monastery elder Zosima, to whom he became attached with all the ardent first love of his unquenchable heart. However, I do not dispute that he was already very strange even then, having been so, in fact, from the cradle. Incidentally, I have already mentioned that, though he was left motherless in only his fourth year, he remembered her all his life afterward, her face, her caresses, “just as if she were standing before me alive.” Such memories can be retained (and everyone knows this) even from an earlier age, even from the age of two, but only standing out all one’s life like points of light in the darkness, like a corner torn out of a huge picture that has all gone dark and vanished except for that little corner. That was exactly how it was with him: he remembered one evening, a quiet summer evening, an open window, the slanting rays of the sun going down (it was the slanting rays he remembered most of all), an icon in the corner of the room, a lighted lamp before it, and before the icon, on her knees, sobbing as if in hysterics, with shrieks and cries, his mother, who had seized him in both arms and was hugging him so tight it hurt, and praying to the Mother of God for him, holding him out of her embrace with both hands toward the icon as if under the Mother of God’s protection… and suddenly the nurse runs in and snatches him from her in fright. What a picture! Alyosha also remembered his mother’s face in that instant: he said that it was frenzied but beautiful, as far as he could recall. But he seldom liked to confide this memory to anyone. In childhood and youth he was not very expansive, not even very talkative, but not from mistrust, not from timidity or sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, it came from something else, from a sort of inner preoccupation, as it were, strictly personal, of no concern to others, but so important for him that because of it he seemed to forget others. But he loved people: it seemed that all his life he lived with complete faith in people, and yet no one ever considered him a simpleton or a naive man. There was something in him that told you and made you feel (and it was so all his life afterward) that he did not want to be a judge of people, that he would not want to take condemnation upon himself and would not condemn for anything. It even seemed that he allowed everything, without condemning in the least, though often grieving very bitterly. More than that, he went so far in this sense that no one could either surprise or frighten him, and this even in his very earliest youth. Arriving in his twentieth year at his father’s, positively in a den of filthy debauchery, he, chaste and pure, would only withdraw in silence when it was unbearable to look, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation for anyone at all. His father, on the other hand, a former hanger-on and therefore a man sensitive and quick to take offense, who had at first received him with mistrust and sullenness (“he keeps very quiet, you know, and does a lot of reasoning to himself”), soon ended, however, by hugging and kissing him terribly often, no later than some two weeks afterward, with drunken tears, true, in tipsy sentimentality, but evidently having come to love him sincerely and deeply, and as such a man had never, of course, managed to love anyone before…

And indeed everyone loved this young man wherever he appeared, and this even from his earliest childhood. When he found himself in the house of his benefactor and guardian, Yefim Petrovich Polenov, he so endeared himself to everyone in that family that they decidedly regarded him there almost as their own child. And yet he entered that house at so tender an age that one could by no means expect calculating cunning in a child, or slyness, or the art of currying favor and pleasing, the knack of making oneself loved. So the gift of arousing a special love for himself lay in him, so to speak, in his very nature, artlessly and directly. It was the same with him at school, and yet, one would think, he was precisely one of those children who arouse mistrust in their schoolmates, sometimes mockery, and perhaps even hatred. He would, for instance, fall into thought and seem to hold himself apart. From his earliest childhood he loved to go off into a corner and read books, and yet his schoolmates, too, came to love him so much that he could decidedly be called the favorite of the whole school for as long as he was there. He was seldom playful, even rarely merry, but everyone who looked at him saw at once that this was not at all from any sullenness in him, that on the contrary he was even-tempered and serene. Among his peers he never wanted to put himself forward. Perhaps for this very reason he was never afraid of anyone, and yet the boys understood at once that he was not at all proud of his fearlessness, but looked as though he did not even understand that he was bold and fearless. He never remembered an offense. It happened that an hour after an offense he would answer the offender, or speak to him first, with such a trusting and serene look, as if nothing had happened between them at all. And it was not that he looked as though he had accidentally forgotten the offense or had deliberately forgiven it; he simply did not regard it as an offense, and this decidedly captivated and won over the children. There was only one trait in him that, in all the classes of the gymnasium, from the lowest even to the highest, aroused in his schoolmates a constant desire to tease him, not out of malicious mockery, but because it was fun for them. This trait in him was a wild, frenzied modesty and chastity. He could not stand hearing certain words and certain kinds of talk about women. These “certain” words and kinds of talk are, unfortunately, impossible to root out in schools. Boys pure in soul and heart, still almost children, very often like to talk among themselves in class, and even aloud, about such things, pictures, and images as even soldiers will not always talk about; what is more, soldiers do not know and do not understand much of what, in this line, is already familiar to such young children of our educated and upper society. There is perhaps no moral depravity in this yet, nor any real cynicism, depraved and inward, but there is the outward kind, and that is often regarded among them as something even refined, subtle, dashing, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that “Alyoshka Karamazov” quickly stopped his ears with his fingers when they began talking “about that,” they would sometimes crowd around him on purpose and, forcibly pulling his hands from his ears, shout filth into both his ears, and he would struggle, slip down to the floor, lie down, cover himself up, and all this without saying a word to them, without swearing, bearing the offense in silence. In the end, however, they left him in peace and no longer teased him as a “girl”; more than that, they looked on him in this respect with pity. Incidentally, in his studies he always stood among the best in the class, but was never ranked first.

When Yefim Petrovich died, Alyosha remained two more years at the provincial gymnasium. Yefim Petrovich’s inconsolable widow, almost immediately after his death, went off for a long stay in Italy with her whole family, which consisted entirely of persons of the female sex, and Alyosha ended up in the house of two ladies whom he had never even seen before, some distant relatives of Yefim Petrovich’s, but on what terms he himself did not know. It was also a characteristic trait of his, and a very characteristic one, that he never cared at whose expense he was living. In this he was the complete opposite of his elder brother, Ivan Fyodorovich, who had gone through two years of poverty at the beginning of the university, feeding himself by his own labor, and who from his earliest childhood had bitterly felt that he was living on a benefactor’s bread, at the expense of others. But it seems this strange trait in Alexei’s character could not be judged very severely, because anyone who got to know him even a little would at once, when this question came up, become convinced that Alexei was without fail one of those young men who are something like holy fools, who, should a whole fortune suddenly fall into his hands, would not hesitate to give it away at the first request, either for a good cause or perhaps even simply to a clever swindler, if the swindler asked him for it. And generally speaking he seemed not to know the value of money at all, not in the literal sense, of course. When he was given pocket money, which he himself never asked for, he either did not know what to do with it for weeks on end or was terribly careless with it, and it vanished from him in a twinkling. Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov, a man very touchy on the subject of money and bourgeois honesty, once, later on, after observing Alexei closely, pronounced the following aphorism about him: “Here, perhaps, is the only man in the world whom you could suddenly leave alone and without money in the square of an unfamiliar city of a million inhabitants, and he would not perish for anything, or die of hunger and cold, because they would feed him in a twinkling, find him a place in a twinkling, and if they didn’t, he would find himself a place in a twinkling, and it would cost him no effort and no humiliation, and would be no burden to whoever took him in, who might perhaps, on the contrary, consider it a pleasure.”

He did not finish the course at his gymnasium; he still had a whole year to go when he suddenly announced to his ladies that he was going to his father on some business that had come into his head. They were very sorry for him and did not want to let him go. The journey cost very little, and the ladies would not allow him to pawn his watch, a present from his benefactor’s family before they went abroad, but supplied him lavishly with means, and even with new clothes and linen. He gave half the money back to them, however, declaring that he absolutely wanted to travel third class. Arriving in our little town, he gave no direct answer to his parent’s first questions: “Why exactly have you come, without finishing your course?” but was, as they say, unusually thoughtful. It soon came out that he was looking for his mother’s grave. He even admitted himself at the time that this was the only reason he had come. But that hardly exhausted the whole reason for his coming. Most likely he did not know himself at the time and could not have explained for anything what exactly it was that had suddenly risen, as it were, out of his soul and drawn him irresistibly onto some new, unknown, but already inevitable road. Fyodor Pavlovich could not show him where he had buried his second wife, because he had never once visited her grave after the coffin was covered with earth, and with the passing of the years had quite forgotten where she had been buried then…

A word about Fyodor Pavlovich. For a long time before this he had not lived in our town. Some three or four years after his second wife’s death he set off for the south of Russia and ended up in Odessa, where he lived for several years running. At first he became acquainted, in his own words, “with a lot of Yids, Yiddies, Yidlings, and Yidlets,” and ended by being received in the end not only by Yids but “by Jews as well.” One must suppose that it was during this period of his life that he developed his special knack for knocking money together and knocking it out of people. He came back to our little town for good only some three years before Alyosha’s arrival. His former acquaintances found him terribly aged, though he was not at all such an old man yet. He carried himself not so much more nobly as somehow more insolently. There appeared in the former buffoon, for instance, an impudent need to make buffoons of others. He liked to behave outrageously with the female sex not just as before, but even, as it were, more disgustingly. Soon he became the founder of many new taverns around the district. One could see that he had, perhaps, as much as a hundred thousand, or perhaps only a little less. Many of the inhabitants of the town and the district at once fell into debt to him, on the most reliable security, of course. Most recently, though, he had somehow grown flabby, had somehow begun to lose his evenness and self-awareness, had even fallen into a sort of frivolity, would start one thing and finish with another, had somehow let himself go, and got drunk more and more often, and if it had not been for that same servant Grigory, who by that time had also aged considerably and looked after him at times almost like a tutor, Fyodor Pavlovich might perhaps not have got along without serious trouble. Alyosha’s arrival seemed to affect him even on the moral side, as though something had woken up in this man, old before his time, of what had long since withered in his soul: “Do you know,” he began to say often to Alyosha, studying him, “that you look like her, like the shrieker?” That was what he called his late wife, Alyosha’s mother. The grave of “the shrieker” was finally shown to Alyosha by the servant Grigory. He took him to our town cemetery and there, in a far corner, showed him a cast-iron slab, inexpensive but neat, on which there was even an inscription with the name, rank, age, and year of death of the deceased, and below there was even inscribed something like a quatrain from the old cemetery verses commonly used on the graves of people of the middling sort. To his surprise, this slab turned out to be Grigory’s doing. It was he himself who had put it up over the grave of the poor “shrieker,” and at his own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovich, whom he had pestered many times with reminders about this grave, at last went off to Odessa, waving his hand not only at graves but at all his memories. At his mother’s grave Alyosha showed no special emotion; he merely heard out Grigory’s solemn and sensible account of the putting up of the slab, stood for a while with his head bowed, and went away without uttering a word. Since then, perhaps even for the whole year, he had not been to the cemetery. But this little episode also had its effect on Fyodor Pavlovich, and a very original one. He suddenly took a thousand rubles and carried it to our monastery for prayers for the soul of his wife, but not his second, not Alyosha’s mother, not “the shrieker,” but his first, Adelaida Ivanovna, who used to thrash him. In the evening of that day he got drunk and cursed the monks to Alyosha. He himself was far from being a religious man; perhaps he had never in his life put a five-kopeck candle before an icon. Strange impulses of sudden feelings and sudden thoughts come over such specimens.

I have already said that he had grown very flabby. His physiognomy by that time presented something that bore sharp witness to the character and essence of the whole life he had lived. Besides the long, fleshy little bags under his small eyes, eternally insolent, suspicious, and mocking, besides the multitude of deep little wrinkles on his small but plump little face, there hung beneath his sharp chin a large Adam’s apple, fleshy and oblong like a purse, which gave him a sort of repulsively sensual look. Add to that a long, carnivorous mouth with puffy lips, from under which could be seen small stumps of black, almost rotted teeth. He sprayed saliva every time he began to speak. However, he himself liked to joke about his face, though, it seems, he was pleased with it. He especially pointed to his nose, not very large but very thin, with a strongly protruding hump: “A real Roman nose,” he used to say, “together with the Adam’s apple, the real physiognomy of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period.” He was proud of this, it seems.

And then, fairly soon after finding his mother’s grave, Alyosha suddenly announced to him that he wished to enter the monastery, and that the monks were willing to take him as a novice. He explained at the same time that this was his extraordinary wish and that he was asking his solemn permission as his father. The old man already knew that the elder Zosima, who was working out his salvation in the monastery hermitage, had made a special impression on his “quiet boy.”

“That elder, of course, is the most honest monk they’ve got,” he said, after listening to Alyosha in thoughtful silence, though almost without surprise at his request. “Hm, so that’s where you want to go, my quiet boy!” He was half drunk, and he suddenly smiled his long, half-drunk smile, which was not without cunning and drunken slyness. “Hm, and you know, I had a feeling you’d end up with something of the sort, can you imagine? That’s exactly where you were heading. Well, why not, you’ve got your own two little thousands, there’s your dowry, and I’ll never abandon you, my angel, and I’ll even pay in for you now whatever’s due, if they ask. Well, and if they don’t ask, why should we push ourselves on them, isn’t that so? After all, you spend money like a canary, two little seeds a week… Hm. You know, there’s a monastery that has a little settlement just outside town, and everyone there knows that only ‘monastery wives’ live in it, that’s what they call them there, about thirty wives, I think… I’ve been there, and, you know, it’s interesting, in its own way, of course, in the sense of variety. The only bad thing is the terrible Russianism, there are no French girls at all yet, though there could be, the means are splendid. They’ll get wind of it, they’ll come. Well, but here there’s nothing, here there are no monastery wives, just some two hundred monks. Honest. Fasters. I confess… Hm. So you want to go to the monks? You know, I feel sorry for you, Alyosha, truly, would you believe it, I’ve grown fond of you… However, here’s a convenient opportunity: you’ll pray for us sinners, we’ve sinned far too much sitting here. I’ve always been thinking about it: who is ever going to pray for me? Is there such a person in the world? Dear boy, you know, I’m terribly stupid about this, maybe you don’t believe it? Terribly. You see: stupid as I am, I keep thinking about it, I keep thinking, now and then, of course, not all the time. It’s impossible, I think, that the devils would forget to drag me down to them with their hooks when I die. Well, and so I think: hooks? And where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some sort of factory down there? Those monks there in the monastery, they probably suppose that hell has a ceiling, for instance. Now I’m ready to believe in hell, only without a ceiling; that seems somehow more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, that is. And in essence, isn’t it all the same: with a ceiling or without a ceiling? That’s what the damned question comes down to! Well, and if there’s no ceiling, then there are no hooks either. And if there are no hooks, then everything goes by the board, which again is improbable: who will drag me off with hooks then, because if they don’t drag me off, then what will happen, where is there any justice in the world? Il faudrait les inventer (they would have to be invented), those hooks, specially for me, for me alone, because if you only knew, Alyosha, what a shameless wretch I am!…”

“Yes, there are no hooks there,” Alyosha said quietly and seriously, studying his father.

“Right, right, only the shadows of hooks. I know, I know. A Frenchman once described hell like that: ‘J’ai vu l’ombre d’un cocher, qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’un carrosse’ (I saw the shadow of a coachman who, with the shadow of a brush, was rubbing down the shadow of a carriage). How do you know there are no hooks, my dear? Stay with the monks a while and you’ll sing a different tune. But anyway, go, get to the truth there, and come and tell me: it’ll be easier to go to the next world all the same if you know for sure what’s there. And it’ll be more proper for you at the monks’ than at my place, with a drunken old man and with girls… though nothing can touch you, like an angel. Well, maybe nothing will touch you there either, that’s why I’m letting you go, because I’m hoping for that last thing. The devil hasn’t eaten your brains. You’ll burn out and go out, you’ll get cured and come back. And I’ll be waiting for you: I do feel that you’re the only person on earth who hasn’t condemned me, my dear boy, I do feel it, how can I not feel it!…”

And he even began to whimper. He was sentimental. He was wicked and sentimental.